A hazelnut is the round nut inside chocolate-hazelnut spread — and the tree it grows on flowers in the middle of winter. USDA counted the acres of hazelnut trees old enough to be making nuts. Which states have the most? Tap them most-to-least.
Tapping assigns 1→4 in order
Nuts are California's job. California! 🐾
2Answer
Among the states USDA prints a number for, the order is…
Oregon — 69,213 acres, about 113.09× the next state on USDA's list, and roughly 95% of every bearing hazelnut acre USDA counted in the country. They are concentrated in one strip of western Oregon, the Willamette Valley — USDA names it as one of the few places in the country mild enough to grow a reliable hazelnut crop. Why so few places? Because of a fungus. Eastern filbert blight is native to the woods of eastern North America. The wild American hazelnut barely notices it — but the European hazelnut that farmers actually plant can be killed by it, and USDA calls the blight the main reason commercial hazelnuts have not been grown elsewhere in the U.S. Even California, which grows more almonds than any other state, gets no hazelnut number here: too few farms grow them there for USDA to print one without giving those farms away.
📚 BackgroundA hazelnut — the round nut inside chocolate-hazelnut spread — grows on a tree that does something almost no other American crop does: it flowers in the middle of winter. That is one reason the map of American hazelnuts is so strange. The other reason is a fungus. Eastern filbert blight is native to eastern North America; the wild American hazelnut shrugs it off, but the European hazelnut farmers actually plant can be killed by it — USDA calls the blight the main reason commercial hazelnuts have not been grown elsewhere in the U.S. So the crop ended up in one mild, rainy valley on the west side of the country.(USDA Northwest Climate Hub, “Climate-Resilient Hazelnuts in Oregon and Washington”)
Note: acres of hazelnut trees old enough to bear nuts, from USDA's 2022 Census of Agriculture — the count of every farm in the country, taken once every five years. Trees too young to bear are on a separate line and are not in this number. USDA NASS. USDA printed a hazelnut acreage figure for 21 states. Eighteen more are blanked out — too few farms grow them there to print a number without giving those farms away — three rounded to almost nothing, and eight states are not in the table at all. Everything the states without a printed number could hold together is far smaller than Oregon's figure, so Oregon's first place is the national one. Below first place, this is the order among the states with a printed number.
USDA NASS Quick Stats: HAZELNUTS - ACRES BEARING, 2022 Census of Agriculture, by state (2026-08-16) — Published values only (the committed raw file holds the API response verbatim). USDA printed a bearing-acreage figure for 21 states. Eighteen more are withheld because too few farms grow hazelnuts there to print a number without giving those farms away, three rounded to almost nothing, and eight states are not in the table at all. Everything the states without a printed number could hold together is far smaller than Oregon's figure, so Oregon's first place is the national one — a check this site re-runs on every build. Below first place, this is the order among the states with a printed number.
↳ In Quick Stats, pick HAZELNUTS / HAZELNUTS - ACRES BEARING, Census year 2022, Total domain, and compare states.